The Rise of the New Tea Party

The vitriol and tone of the Sanders campaign resembles something else in recent history; the Tea Party.

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, in the two party system, a group of angry party voters of a certain age felt disaffected and ignored. These disaffected voters began organizing, began rallying, began decrying how their voices weren’t being heard, about how big money had corrupted politics, and began massive rallies and protests about how broken the system was. They claimed the media never paid attention to them, that corporate overlords were preventing people from seeing the will of the people. The members of this movement took to social media, upholding deified candidates as the champions of the cause. They created labels to celebrate who was like them, and accused people with similar beliefs as being different. They claimed they were winning elections when in reality, they weren’t.

No, this wasn’t the Tea Party surfacing within Republican Party circa 2010, this is the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign within the Democratic party today.

Before I go any further and risk being doxxed by hordes of angry social media users, let me say this; while the movements and the demands are similar, the policies each movement support could not be more different. The Tea Party demands a miniscule federal government. They insist on restricting access to reproductive rights, and they swear by reducing the rights of LGBTQ people. The Tea Party emboldens racists and empowers white privilege. The Sanders Campaign is a different story; they want to expand the federal government to provide more services, they stand fully in support of reproductive rights, and LGBTQ folks. The Tea Party is fiercely dedicated to American exceptionalism, the Sanders Campaign believes we should be more like Europe. They are literal opposites.

Policy aside though, the differences end there.

At first glance, it’s easy to see their similarity; both the Sanders Campaign and the Tea Party are policy hard-liners. They’re rigid in their commands and demands for their causes. There is no room for negotiation, no room for compromise. They believe in their way or the high-way, an attitude that has never proven successful in governing in American politics. Where the Tea Party holds the line is on removing entitlements, ending social welfare, and removing government control in everything. The Sanders campaign, while largely opposing, commits to the same message of unyielding fight, their argument being that big money in politics is the one true evil in our political ecosystem.

In terms of impact, both the Tea Party, and Sanders supporters have driven the national agenda for their party to the right or left. Both have attracted a large enough following that their agendas both must have a seat at the table in the party leadership. For Tea Partiers, that means elevating a movement darling like Paul Ryan to the Speaker of the House role. For Democrats, that means the issues presented by the Sanders supporters must be forefront on national Democratic party agendas, whether a $15/hour minimum wage, or a repeal of Citizens United, Democrats must listen to and recognize the hold the Sanders supporters have on some wings of the party.

Their membership, too is something both movements are key to identify. The Tea Party, for a while, made efforts to label certain candidates as “true conservatives.” Such firebrands as Michele Bachmann, Ted Cruz, Allen West, and Joe Miller were granted the label by the movement, celebrated, supported, and in the case of Cruz, even deified. Celebrities too; Glenn Beck was the media hero, Rush Limbaugh lauded for his support. For the Sanders Campaign, they’ve done the same; labeling his Presidential opponent Hillary Clinton not a real “progressive” for the crime of supporting a $12/hour minimum wage, instead of a $15/hour minimum wage, a three dollar difference. With this, Sanders supporters were eager to tar Clinton as the friend of Big-Business and certainly not a progressive despite her record. They then went on to celebrate predetermined progressive politicians like Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Reich, and celebrities like Sarah Silverman and Susan Sarandon.

In their relationships with the media, both the Sanders Campaign and the Tea Party insist they aren’t receiving adequate news media coverage. Whether they blame their lack of coverage on the “lamestream liberal media” (a Palinism so bad my spell-check gagged on it) or the “moneyed corporate interests” both groups insist they do not get the coverage their movement needs. Both movements even conducted protests of the CNN headquarters to demand more focus and to end the media “blackout.” Whether a vast conspiracy exists by media moguls meeting in the H of the Hollywood sign, I’ll leave that to you to figure out.

In demographics too, the Tea Party and the Sanders campaign have similarities. They’re both clustered around one age group, and both are primarily white. The Tea Party at it’s height, was bolstered by 50> year old conservatives, and the Sanders Campaign remains buoyed and backed by the <30 year old liberals, capturing the lion’s share of them in all of the contests thus far.

Also worth noting as well, the Tea Party and the Sanders Supporters have made intense use of social media, but not necessarily factually checking their sources. Tea Partiers love sharing memes like this:

Meanwhile, lifting pages from the same book, Sanders supporters share memes that implying their candidate is winning in raw votes, when, he most definitely isn’t.

Under the softest of scrutiny, (a mild Googling, even) these memes collapse like a structure made of wet noodles, but even more so, this underscores a dark reality, that both movements don’t want to acknowledge, that there is radical misinformation behind their messaging.

There are other parallels as well that warrant noting. Both movements decry the mainstream party establishment, they both stoke cries of revolution, they both have slogans and logos, but most importantly, they threaten to break with the party that houses them if they don’t get their way. Tea Partiers expressed their distaste with the “moderate” Mitt Romney in 2012 (those were the days, eh?) and elected to stay home. In the same breath, some die-hard Sanders supporters have swore that even if Clinton is nominated over Sanders, they’d stay home or vote Republican. This, for the future of the Democratic party, is cancerous and fatal, something we must work doubly hard to avoid, as it’s proven disastrous for the Republicans for the last three presidential elections.

Personally, I think the biggest similarity is the virulence and vitriol. Last week, I took the subway to work, (an infrequence, I’m aware) and in crossing through the station, listening to a podcast and wearing a small Clinton button on my jacket lapel, I was accosted by a woman in her thirties. She followed me as I entered the station, and our conversation went something like this:

“Hey, the best candidate won in Wisconsin last night,” she started, out of the blue. I removed one earbud to hear her and smiled. “Indeed, Congrats to your camp,” and I began walking away toward the stiles. She followed.

“You know, she’s a traitor to the American people.” I smiled again.

“You can’t believe that silly Republican talking point, can you? I mean, I think we agree on more than we disagree,” I said, politely, still, albeit my smile fading.

“No, we don’t. I’m never voting for her, ever, even if she’s the Democrat, FEEL THE BERN!” she shouted as I moved toward the escalators, eager to remove myself from this barrage of crazy. As I quickly scanned for the nearest boarding train, destination irrelevant, escape critically needed, I wondered, what had motivated her to be so angry and so pissed? Was she really going to stay home or vote Republican if (read: when) Clinton is nominated as the Democratic Nominee or was it all talk? This virulence and anger is where the tea party and the Sanders Supporters most closely align. In my years of tracking elections, even in the angriest of moments in 2008, or the most bitter of contests in 2004, never before has intra-party fighting escalated to this magnitude.

Under the softest of scrutiny, (a mild googling, even) these memes collapse like a house made of wet noodles, but even more so, this underscores a dark reality, that both movements don’t want to acknowledge, that there is radical misinformation behind some of their messaging.

Never before have such hackles been raised, nor has such bitterness existed. Metrics exist to chart this. A recent poll from McClatchy-Marist surveyed both Clinton and Sanders Supporters. In it, 25% of Sanders supporters, one in four, reported they would never vote for Clinton in a general election match-up against a Republican nominee. The number of among Clinton supporters? That number plummets to only 14%.

Charles Blow, in his Op-Ed in the New York Times recently wrote:

“It is unfortunate for Sanders, who seems infinitely sober and sensible, that some of his surrogates and supporters present themselves as absolutist and doctrinaire. As Sanders himself has said, “on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day.””

It’s no secret that whichever candidate becomes the nominee, will need all of the support from the other candidate to defeat the Republicans in the fall. We know this. Without roughly half of the Democratic voters, a Republican victory in the White House is all but assured. So what does it mean, that these supporters would derail the race to the White House for the sake of anger?

While the Tea Party’s influence has waned into just “conservative” support, the answer for the Sanders people isn’t one they want to hear. It means that while in policy Sanders Supporters are unlike the Tea Party, in terms of their hard-line stances and refusal to compromise for their demands, they are as equally radical, and equally as dangerous.

In order to win, we as a party, must be cautious.